According to reports by TechConnect Magazine, the third generation of the SATA interface could be introduced as early as the second quarter of this year. The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), who have developed the technology, are expected to finalize specifications, with the launch of products sporting the new interface at the same time. The first backwards compatible drives to feature the new interface are expected to be solid state drives (SSD), followed by hard disk drives (HDD) shortly after. The main advancement is doubling the bandwidth from 3Gbps to 6Gbps, but until the official announcement of the final specifications are released, we will not know what further changes are in store.Source: TechConnect

32 Commentson 6 Gbps SATA Drives Could Arrive as Early as Q2 2009

newtekie1 said:What is the point when drives aren't even hitting 1.5Gb/s, and they definitely aren't even coming close to 3.0Gb/s?

Just an internal speed rating, the electronics are capable of doing 3.0Gb/s, although the drive isn't able to, it may have an effect on the actual throughput of the drive even though physically it's not hitting the electrical limitation.

We also have no boards to support such technology yet and being the x58 was just released, I think we are a little off from having it anyways. It will be good as we continue to need faster drives, comparatively speaking drives have gotten much larger than faster.

Notice how a Raptor 10k Sata1 loses in burst speeds to a decent 7200rpm Sata2 drive, even though the speeds are not breaking the 1.5Gb/s rate.

newtekie1 said:Intel's high end SSD drives have not even come close to reaching these speeds. Burst speeds are only hitting 250MB/s, and sustained read speeds are only 230MB/s. No where near the 375MB/s given by SATA 3.0Gb/s. And it is unlikely we will see SSD drives breaking the 375MB/s mark.

I doubt it, SSD drives still have horribly short life spans and that won't change any time soon. I'm not going to pay $500+ for a 32GB drive only to have it fail after a year of use.

The latest generation SSD's have shown to saturate SATA1.5 and coming close to hitting the limits of SATA3.0.